Guide - updated
Paste a newsletter into ChatGPT or Claude and ask for the key points, or use the summary button in Gmail or Apple Mail if your plan or iPhone has one. Both work one email at a time. To have every newsletter summarised without doing anything, read them in an app that summarises them as they arrive. Readbase does it for every newsletter on the free plan, keeps each summary on top of the full text, and writes summaries in six languages.
Get your newsletter addressThe Coffee Ledger
8 min readWhy Northwind closed 40 stores and still grew
Northwind spent this year doing something coffee chains rarely admit to: getting smaller. It closed 40 of its 310 stores1, most of them in city centres where the weekday crowds never came back.
The surprise is what happened next. Sales rose 6%1 over the same twelve months, and almost all of the growth came from the edge of town, where drive-throughs now take 61% of orders2. Every store it opens next year will have one2.
The other change was quieter. Northwind cut its menu by a third3, dropping the seasonal drinks that slowed the queue, and the average order went from $7.20 to $8.103. Fewer choices, it turns out, meant people added a pastry.
None of this was the plan in January. The closures started as a cost exercise, and the menu came later, after a franchise owner in the north timed her queue with a stopwatch.
Summary
Eight minutes of reading, twenty seconds to decide.
Not "This newsletter discusses the coffee industry." That tells you the topic, which you knew from the subject line.
A useful summary tells you what the newsletter says: the claim, the names and numbers behind it, and why it matters. Three or four lines of that is enough to decide whether to read the rest.
Copy the newsletter's text into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and ask for a summary. They handle long newsletters well, and you can ask follow-up questions about anything you did not follow.
A prompt that works: "Summarise this newsletter in three bullet points. Keep the names and numbers it is built on, end with one line on why it matters, and do not add anything that is not in the text."
The catch is the copying. It works for one long read you want to get through, not for twenty newsletters a week.
Gmail can summarise an email with Gemini, on Google plans that include it. On an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, Mail can summarise an email you open and shows short summaries in the inbox list.
Both are built for every kind of email, from receipts to meeting invites, so a long newsletter often comes back as a sentence about what it covers rather than what it says. And the newsletters stay in your inbox, between the mail that needs a reply.
Digest services read your newsletters for you and send back one combined summary.
A digest saves the clicking, but it lands back in your personal inbox as one more email, and blending many writers into one summary loses who said what. Readless also has no free plan, and its trial asks for a card.
The option that needs nothing from you: newsletters arrive at an address of their own, and each one is summarised before you see it.
Our pick
Every newsletter arrives at your private @readbase.io address with a summary already written, on the free plan. Each summary is written from the whole newsletter, not just the opening, as three or four bullets that keep the names and numbers, and sits on top of the full text so the original is one scroll away. Summaries can be in English, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian or German, whatever language the newsletter is in. On Premium, Ask AI answers questions about a newsletter or explains a passage you select.
Get your newsletter addressMeco summarises newsletters too, but only on Meco PRO. Readwise Reader summarises what you save to its library, but newsletters in its Feed only when you ask, and it has no free plan after its trial.
The short answers are here. Ask anything else at the bottom, and we answer it from what is on this site.
Not on its own: it summarises what you paste into it, one newsletter at a time. To have every newsletter summarised as it arrives, use a newsletter app that does it, such as Readbase, which does it on the free plan.
They are good at pulling out what a newsletter says, and can still get a detail wrong. Readbase's summaries are told to stay strictly inside the text and are written from the whole newsletter. Open the full text before you quote or act on anything.
Yes. Readbase summarises every newsletter you receive on its free plan, with a private @readbase.io address to subscribe with, on iPhone and the web.
In Readbase, yes. Choose English, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian or German in Settings, and every new newsletter is summarised in that language, whatever language it was written in.
A private address for your newsletters and a summary on every one, on the free plan.
No card required.
